The lecture was followed by a panel discussion in which SURF Founder, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, offered a powerful reflection on the issue:

Forgiveness without justice is a betrayal of my family. Forgiveness is between me and my God. It is not a matter of national policy.

Individuals who have to deal with the aftermath of horrendous atrocities should not also be robbed of their independence to decide when to forgive or not.

Forced forgiveness is insensitive, intrusive and morally isolating. Those who choose not to subscribe to society’s pressure to comply and be seen to forgive should be given that right to do so.

Violence can and is justified – not in revenge, but in defence. That defence for survivors is ever necessary today, as perpetrators continue and try finish what they almost succeeded in doing in 1994.

The full text of Mary’s address is available here: Forgiveness Presentation.

The lecture was an initiative of The Forgiveness Project, in which Mary’s story is featured alongside that of Archbishop Tutu.

The Independent newspaper also featured a report on the event.

There are a number of survivors that I meet during the course of my work, that have great moral courage. The President of SURF’s partner IBUKA, the umbrella body of survivor’s organisation in Rwanda, is amongst them.

Theodore Simburudali spoke out this week about the ongoing threat to survivors posed by the release of prisoners of the genocide as a result of them giving evidence at gacaca, sparked by the killing of four survivors over the past week. As he commented:

“These assassinations still bear the hallmarks of the genocide ideology and are punishment for victims who have testified in the gacaca tribunals.”

Thankfully, the perpetrators of the grenade attack have been arrested. However, the news is testament to the continuing need to tackle genocidal ideology in Rwanda, as well as to ensure the security of survivors – an aim to which SURF is working towards, in particular addressing the threat to women survivors through a gender-based violence programme funded by the Sigrid Rausing Trust. Through a grant from Comic Relief, SURF has also been working with IBUKA and other survivor’s organisation to strengthen their capacity to advocate for the rights of survivors.

As demonstrated by this recent episode, there is sadly much more work still to do.

At the 64th General Assembly of the United Nations last month, a resolution was adopted calling for the urgent implementation of proposals to assist survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide “requesting the Secretary-General to encourage relevant United Nations agencies, funds and programmes to provide assistance in the areas of education, medical care, skills training and microcredit programmes aimed at promoting self-sufficiency.”

SURF continues to back a campaign calling on the UN to honour this resolution which was first introduced six years ago. Hopefully this pledge will now move us one step closer to achieving the restorative justice that such a resolution offers to survivors.

Heroes Of Our Time, SURF’s exhibition on the situation of survivors 15 years on from the genocide, came to the end of its successful run at the LSE last month. It is always positive to receive feedback on the work, which is testament to the power of the photography of Andrew Sutton. Andrew will be attending the opening of the next run of the exhibition on Monday 11th January at Oxford House in Bethnal Green, where it will be displayed for three weeks to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2010.

As we prepare for what we expect will be another difficult year ahead, it is at least reassuring to know that our work is having some impact. For that we have you, our supporters, to thank.

Survivors Fund is often asked to comment on such news stories, which presents an opportunity to convey our perspective. However, due to the requirements of the media for a sound bite, it is always a challenge to convey our position in such few words. It is easier for us to do so in our newsletter, the October issue of which we have just published (to receive future issues, just sign up here).

However, on this announcement, we released the following:

“The arrest today of Idelphonse Nizeyimana is a positive development in the ongoing work for retributive justice for survivors. But there are still many more genocidaires at large, and still survivors of the genocide do not receive the support from the international community to deliver at the very least restorative justice to rebuild their lives. Until that situation changes, justice will never have been truly served.”

There were many points that we may have stressed, such as the cost and duration of trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) which has amounted to more than $1 billion over the past fifteen years resulting in the conviction of less than 40 genocidaires. Though the ICTR has delivered some landmark rulings, is this money well spent, and how much more money will be required to now try Nizeyimana?

It is without question that the arrest is a positive development, but might justice be better served by trying him in Rwanda – an expedited and less expensive process? Then the UN may be more able to meet its resolution to provide greater assistance to survivors – where arguable justice would be better served.

The foundation of the article is built on a review of The Strategy of Antelopes by Jean Hatzfeld (published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail). It is a sequel to 2 of his earlier works, which document the testimonies of survivors (Into the Quick of Life) and perpetrators (A Time for Machetes) of the genocide.

There are many choice quotes in the essay, which alongside Philip Gourevitch’s Rwanda, The Life After published in the New Yorker, is the most insightful overview of the situation of survivors in Rwanda today of late. I highlight just one here, as Stansell refers to Hatzfeld’s interviewees:

“The politics are clear to the Rwandans: reconciliation “satisfies the authorities, the international donors, and as for the sorrow of the survivors, that’s just too bad,” maintains Marie-Louise Kagoyire. Innocent Rwililiza, with a sure grasp of the global economy of penance, captures the interplay of self-interest and spurious affect: “If you think about it, who is it talking about forgiveness? The Tutsis? The Hutus? The freed prisoners, their families? None of them. It’s the humanitarian organizations. They are importing forgiveness to Rwanda, and they wrap it in lots of dollars to win us over. There is a Forgiveness Plan just as there is an AIDS Plan, with public awareness meetings, posters, petty local presidents, super-polite whites in all-terrain turbo vehicles.” That last image packs a punch, because white Land Rovers were the vehicles in which U.N. workers and soldiers hightailed it out of Rwanda as the genocide began.”

SURF’s focus is on justice for survivors, not forgiveness for the killers. To this end we continue to campaign.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We staged the event with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica as a backdrop. Guernica has hung outside the Security Council at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 1985 to 2009, and it was the failure of the Security Council to act in 1994 that allowed and exacerbated the genocide. It is also the failure of the Unted Nations General Assembly to honour its resolution (62/96) that has prevented survivors from receiving the support they still critically need.

There is a thread that runs through all the work of SURF, a motivation to ensure that the voice of survivors is heard, that the memory of genocide is kept alive and that the victims are never forgotten.  The event vitally demostrated that people in the UK not only remember the one million victims of the genocide in the 1994, but that they care about those still living with the legacy of the genocide.

We call on the international community, and in particular the UN, to listen and act.

Survivors continue to campaign for retributive justice, however where that is not possible then SURF supports their call for restorative justice. On Sunday, SURF is hosting a Reading of the Testimonies at Whitechapel Gallery in London to mark the 15th Anniversary of the end of the genocide. Though many years have passed since the events that resulted in the killing of one million Tutsis and Tutsi-sympathisers, survivors continue to deal with the consequences of genocide largely without international support.

We are hoping that supporters will join us to read a testimony of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, in a unique event to raise awareness of the situation of survivors in Rwanda today and as a call to action to the United Nations General Assembly to honour its resolution to provide greater support to survivors.

The importance of justice for survivors is explained in an interview on the BBC Today Programme with Lord Malloch Brown, who resigned yesterday as Minister for Africa, Asia and the UN. His support for survivors in that postition has been important too.

On Sunday, Miracle Corners of the World is hosting a commemoration event in New York on Denial, Memory and Justice in post-genocide Rwanda. Chantal Kayitesi, a founding member and former President of AVEGA, one of our partners, will be speaking alongside the respected academics, Gerald Lewis Caplan and Jens Meierhenrich.

Earlier this week, I met with Redress, a London-based organisation helping survivors obtain justice and reconciliation. Their vital work extends beyond just Rwanda, but its recent publication with African Rights of a report on Survivors and Post-Genocide Justice in Rwanda has proved to be a real landmark in establishing the situation of survivors today. 

As last week’s High Court case preventing the extradition of four genocide suspects proved,  justice – or lack thereof – for survivors is an issue that is also playing out close to home too. Thus SURF’s work, allied with organisations such as Redress and Miracle Corners of the World, continues to be pressing both here in the UK, as well as Rwanda.